Findologic Video Dev News // November 2021

Findologic’s latest development update of 2021 sees Principal Engineer, Georg Sort explain the latest innovations to our platform. Our development team are continually improving our technologies to ensure that Findologic clients have access to the best solutions on the market. 

Our most recent developments include:

Assisted Suggest API: You can find the API specification at https://service.findologic.com/ps/centralized-frontend/spec/

Data Sync: Another big topic for us recently was to improve the quality of self service around our data sync mechanism, that is the periodic or manual update of your product data at Findologic.

Import Log List: The list of data sync jobs can now be sorted and filtered with just a few clicks, for example to only see jobs that failed. Similarly filters can be applied to the date or the trigger, so whether this was a scheduled or manual data sync.

Log Archive: The import logs are now available for up to the last 30 days. Again, it’s easy to sort and filter the log lines, for example to see warnings or errors only.

Import Schedule: Another exciting feature that is currently being rolled out is a self-service configurable data sync schedule. This allows you to configure the timing and interval of the periodic data sync, whether this should happen every hour, three times a day, just once per night or whatever else might work for you. Note that the minimum interval depends on your plan. The schedule is configured based on Cron Expressions that provide maximum flexibility to fit your needs, and it also comes with a nice preview to validate the configuration.

Import Failed Notifications: Another feature that will help with your internal processes is the option to configure contacts that will be notified when the periodic data sync fails. They will receive a mail with actionable errors and helpful hints on how to solve those

Findologic Video Dev News // July 2021

Findologic’s third development update of 2021 sees Principal Engineer, Georg Sort explain the latest innovations to our platform. Our development team are continually improving our technologies to ensure that Findologic clients have access to the best solutions on the market. 

Our most recent developments include:

00:20 Shopping guide API
05:15 Li.S.A® API

Findologic Video Dev News // May 2021

Findologic’s second development update of 2021 sees Principal Engineer, Georg Sort explain the latest innovations to our platform. Our development team are continually improving our technologies to ensure that Findologic clients have access to the best solutions on the market. 

Our most recent developments include:

00:20 Shopify Multilanguage
01:15 BigCommerce App
02:09 Turkisch, Romanian, Finnish, Korean
03:20 Improved Assisted Suggest
05:20 Express Guide Overlay

Findologic Video Dev News // March 2021

Findologic’s first development update of 2021 sees CTO, Georg Sorst explain the latest innovations to our platform. Our development team are continually improving our technologies to ensure that Findologic clients have access to the best solutions on the market.

Our most recent developments include:

00:20: FINDOLOGIC Li.S.A.

• An improved user interface, further streamlining the ability for user inspiration based on their preferences (via our A.I. based shopping assistant, Li.S.A.)
• An improved user interface for Findologic’s express guides, increasing usability
• The ability to further drill down into search results – Li.S.A. now employs both category refinement and express guides in tandem with one another

04:16: Improved feature "Support for variants“

• Support for variants – when a user specifies a particular variant for a product, only exact and relevant specifications and imagery will be displayed
• Different prices for each variant, size or colour are now possible
• Consistent images between product listing and product detail page

06:13: Improved feature "Assisted Suggest“

• Assisted Suggest now provides even further inspiration to users with immediate product suggestions, and the ability to refine these product suggestions live within the Assisted Suggest box
• First touch interaction improves the customer experience

Dev News // November 2020

A walk-through of the latest news and developments on the Findologic platform, from CTO, Georg Sorst.

Li.S.A. for navigation

Findologic’s flagship product, Li.S.A., a pioneering, A.I. based shopping assistant is advancing in its capabilities. Previously, Li.S.A. exclusively delivered intelligent search results based on relevant skills. Now, the product can also be applied to category pages, to enhance those product listings and improve user experience.

Let’s say I want to buy a new bed. 

I navigate to the ‘bed’ category of a store, and Li.S.A. generates a summary of the sub-categories that fall under the ‘bed’ umbrella. Users are able to conveniently switch between sub-categories and are presented with overviews of each.

Our regular, effective filters are still available to drill down on results once the user knows what sub-category of bed they are looking for.

Category filters

One highly requested feature that the Findologic team have been working on, and is soon to be rolled out, is the ability to configure navigation filters by category.

Filters don’t always work on a one-size-fits-all basis. It may be the case that you want a specific filter displayed in one category, but want to hide it in another where it isn’t relevant.

Taking a look at this example, we can see that the ‘Manufacturer’ filter isn’t relevant, and should not be displayed, because there is only one option.

So, let’s update that. 

Click on the icon… It’s automatically saved… and that’s it.

Refresh the category page and you can see the ‘Manufacturer’ filter is no longer displayed.

Again, if you want to reset the category filter configuration, it is a very simple click.

Refreshing the category page we can see that the filter has been activated again.

Similarly, you can also reorder category filters by relevance. An example of this would be a category where it is particularly important to be able to filter by brand – Findologic’s software updates now allow you to prioritize the brand filter and display it as the first preference.

FINDOLOGIC API

Something for the developers is Findologic’s search and navigation API, that clients can use to integrate with Findologic on their site. The API supports well-documented XML and JSON responses. 

We recognize that fiddling with these responses can be complicated, and are providing a PHP library to simplify the process.

The Findologic API library can be found on our GitHub page.

From the example, you can see that it provides convenient object-oriented access to the Findologic API responses.

Ultimately, the team has created something simple to use, that will save our clients time and resources when navigating custom integrations of the Findologic APIs. It’s stable and built for production; in fact, it’s used internally by some of our plugins, for example, the Shopware 6 plugin!

We are constantly working to deliver advanced and effective features to our clients, and look forward to updating you with even more developments in the near future.

Dev News // August 2020

Every few months our CTO Georg Sorst takes some time out of his busy schedule to show you some of the new features and technologies that our Development teams are currently working on or have released. Enjoy!

Filter Configuration

Our new Customer Backend now comes with a brand new filter configuration. With the filter configuration you can easily configure the look and feel of the search and category result filters. You can

• Order filters to configure which filter should be displayed first, second and so on

• Change the configuration of individual filters, such as the display name or filter type

• Undo accidental changes

• Disable or enable filters with a single click

Enhancements for Category Navigation

Another big focus was on improving the possibilities of what you can do with Findologic in the category navigation, and two more existing Merchandising features have been enhanced to support category navigation.

Promotions

You can now use Promotions to display banners on top of category pages, just like you can with the search results. With these banners you can direct your user’s attention to campaigns such as summer sales, new product releases or special landing pages.

You can use the same Promotion on search result and category pages, providing your users with a consistent shopping experience.

Product Placements

Another feature that has been enhanced to work with category navigation are Product Placements. Product Placements can be used to manually override Findologic’s ranking algorithm to pin certain products to the beginning of the search or category listing. This can be useful in cases where there is not enough information available to the ranking algorithm but the products need to be placed very prominently. One example could be brand new products.

Again, the same Product Placement can be used on search result and category pages for a consistent shopping experience.

Plugins

plentymarkets Ceres 5

Our plentymarkets Ceres plugin has been updated to support plentymarkets Ceres 5, the current major version of plentymarkets Ceres.

The Findologic plugin for plentymarkets Ceres 5 is available in the plentymarkets store and provides a full Plug&Play experience.

Shopware 6 Platform

Our Shopware plugin has been updated to support Shopware 6, the current major version of Shopware. Besides a full Plug&Play experience the latest version of the plugin provides a number of improvements:

• Staging mode: For customers without a dedicated staging system the plugin can simply be installed into the productive system. Its integrated staging mode allows you to configure and test the plugin without affecting your live users. This works for both Direct Integrations and API integrations.
• Configuration of Direct Integration containers: The required HTML containers for a Direct Integration can be configured in the Shopware backend, making a Direct Integration even less effortless.
• Config validation: The Shopware backend validates the Findologic shopkey to prevent configuration errors.

The Findologic plugin for Shopware 6 is available in the Shopware store.